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Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

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Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#91

Post by magicalhippo »

ghostpepper wrote: post #85
magicalhippo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had limited luck using the provided language model, but very good results when providing my own. So if you feel the results are poor, try building your own language model. AFAIK DeepSpeech works by using the neural net to detect characters from speech, and then the language model is used to try to make a sentence out of the character stream, by doing a kind of graph search. Thus if the language model doesn't contai…

For a software engineer with no experience in machine learning / AI, what does it mean to build your own language model? Does it require coding? Hundreds of hours of audio data from your own voice? A significant amount of computing power?

> Hundreds of hours of audio data from your own voice?

I should clarify this. As I mentioned, training the neural net part requires tons of audio and the corresponding text (and people should totally contribute[1], the resulting data sets are released to the public). The neural net in DeepSpeech is then used on an audio stream and outputs a stream of characters.

Turning that stream of characters into sentences is what the language model is for.

Training the neural net is very data and compute intensive, but fortunately Mozilla provides pre-trained models.

Generating the language model is relatively cheap. And if your target language shares sounds with English, you may get away with using the English-trained neural net but with a non-English language model.

[1]: https://voice.mozilla.org/

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#92

Post by beerandt »

Homeseer automation software has this built in, with client listening apps for different platforms. I haven't used the voice recognition beyond testing, but I've been very happy with the software overall. It's relatively expensive, but goes on sale for about half price once or twice a year. There's a free 30 day trial.

I think there's two id phrases per sub-device by default, but using virtual devices vastly expands the software's capability. Especially for mapping virtual switches to multiple devices.

They also have zwave devices that for the most part are much better than most.

https://www.homeseer.com

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#93

Post by guptaneil »

byteshock wrote: post #79
guptaneil wrote: post #65

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Hiome, a smart home startup focused on private by design local-only products. What actions are you looking to handle with the assistant? Reason I ask is because a voice assistant is a command line interface with no auto-complete or visual feedback. It doesn’t scale well as you add more devices or commands to your home, because it becomes impossible to remember all the phrases you progr…

You really trying to promote your product? Corporate promotions really ruin the atmosphere... Take your corporate shilling elsewhere. I'm sure OP doesn't appreciate it.

Sorry you felt like that was corporate shilling. This is a problem we see people hit often and have built something to improve the experience, so it felt worth sharing. If it helps, we're a 2 person team (hardly a corporation) and we received YC's Startup School grant last year, for whatever that's worth on their forums.

I do mean it that I'm happy to talk about anything smart home related, so feel free to email me! I spend a lot of my time helping people plan out their smart home build from scratch, including choosing between types of light switches, thermostats, platform, etc unrelated to our sensors.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#94

Post by rs23296008n1 »

guptaneil wrote: post #65

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Hiome, a smart home startup focused on private by design local-only products. What actions are you looking to handle with the assistant? Reason I ask is because a voice assistant is a command line interface with no auto-complete or visual feedback. It doesn’t scale well as you add more devices or commands to your home, because it becomes impossible to remember all the phrases you progr…

Sure. We've got a house with multiple buildings, including sheds, halls etc.

Around 100 people need separate profiles, each should be able to set alarms, timers, reminders, etc. if they want a routine to create any of those or tell them time or date or temperature they should be able to do that from any of the voice assistants in any room. They might only want such a routine in a particular room. They should be able to define a home device and a current device. Home device would usually be a bedroom for those of us that need them etc.

I definitely don't want to have to create any of those routines etc for any of them. Nothing about these should be fixed in stone. They have to be able to self-serve. We can assume they can navigate the ios amazon app as a baseline level of knowledge.

Room settings include temperature, lighting, curtains, tv on/off, channel, volume to name a few. The voice assistant in some rooms should be able to show web pages on-screen, or even youtube etc. including the laptop someone plugged in on HDMI1.

...the coffee machine automation is also a requirement. Its controlled by a flask app. The voice control should be able to let you order a coffee, strong, black. Or a Dave#5.

We'd also like device detection to trigger when people's phones appear in certain locations.

What kinds of options exist for this?

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#95

Post by rs23296008n1 »

guptaneil wrote: post #93
byteshock wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really trying to promote your product? Corporate promotions really ruin the atmosphere... Take your corporate shilling elsewhere. I'm sure OP doesn't appreciate it.

Sorry you felt like that was corporate shilling. This is a problem we see people hit often and have built something to improve the experience, so it felt worth sharing. If it helps, we're a 2 person team (hardly a corporation) and we received YC's Startup School grant last year, for whatever that's worth on their forums. I do mean it that I'm happy to talk about anything smart home related, so feel free to email me!…

Don't know about "corporate shilling" - you weren't covert at all.

I did ask for options after all.

The only gotcha is the requirements will overwhelm most basic setups fairly quickly. Not talking 20 lights here or a tv or desk or two.

I've replied to your original comment, thanks.

PS I forgot to mention, all this exists right now as a mixture of amazon echo and a set of text inputs via phone over wifi for evaluation. As we implement more it turns into more voice control and less of a giant hack. So some bits are half-baked but functional.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#96

Post by arejaytee »

rs23296008n1 wrote: post #19
albertzeyer wrote: post #10

Are you searching for a complete solution including NLP and an engine to perform actions? Some of these are already posted, like Home Assistant, and Mycroft. Sphinx is just for the automatic speech recognition (ASR) part. But there are better solutions for that: Kaldi ( https://kaldi-asr.org/ ) is probably the most comprehensive ASR solution, which yields very competitive state-of-the-art results. RASR ( https://www-…

Already got the action engine: all the lights, hvac, tv, calculator, computers, etc are all controllable. None require internet now. Or any kind of location services for that matter. I really just want the speech-to-text. Ideally I'd also like it to recognise who's talking. But that's a bonus.

Would love to know more about this and how you've done it

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#97

Post by lunixbochs »

otodic wrote: post #68
lunixbochs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently, the SDK supports English and Spanish out of the box. Additional ASR Bundles for most major spoken languages can be provided upon request within 6-8 weeks. Does this mean you have a standing offer to train a new language on demand?

Yes, for a number of European and some Asian languages we can do this; it's mainly the question of business opportunity.

That's very cool. Did you somehow solve autogenerating a training corpus for a new language as long as it's popular? Based on my impressions working with other people in the space, coming up with the training data seems like a big bottleneck - as the available engines are pretty good at learning new languages already.

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#98

Post by lunixbochs »

rs23296008n1 wrote: post #52
lunixbochs wrote: post #42

Hi, I'm the dev behind https://talonvoice.com I've been working with Facebook's wav2letter project and the results (speed on CPU, command accuracy) are extremely good in my experience. They also hold the "state of the art" for librispeech (a common benchmark) on wer_are_we [1]. Granted, that's with a 2GB model that doesn't run very well on CPU, but I think most of the fully "state of the art" models are computational…

Looks interesting. I've got a few GPUs I could use if the CPU is too much of a bottleneck. We've identified a dictionary of the types of commands and words we use and have a recording of all our amazon and other commands. Training wave files are not an issue. Have you had any issues with recognising multiple languages? Thanks!

Are you willing to list the languages you'd like to recognize?

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#99

Post by lukifer »

I’m currently assembling an offline home assistant setup using Node-RED and voice2json, all running on Raspberry Pi’s:

http://voice2json.org/

https://nodered.org/

Requires a little customization and/or coding, but it’s quite elegant, and all voice recognition happens on-device. Part of what makes the recognition much more accurate (subjectively, 99%ish) is the constrained vocabulary; the grammars are compiled from a simple user-defined markup language, and then parsed into JSON intents, containing both the full text string and appropriate keywords/variables split out into slots.

Just finished a similar rig in my car, acting as a voice-controlled MP3 player, with thousands of artists and albums compiled into intents from iTunes XML database. Works great, and feels awesome to have a little 3-watt baby computer doing a job normally delegated to massive corporate server farms. ;)

Re: Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?

#100

Post by deca6cda37d0 »

microtherion wrote: post #88

Apple platforms offer an API (SFSpeechRecognizer) which for some languages supports on-device recognition. Trivial to set up, super easy to use, and pretty reasonable accuracy. Disclaimer: Working for Apple, not directly on this API but in related subjects.

I guess not always.

“The speech recognition process involves capturing audio of the user’s voice and sending that data to Apple’s servers for processing. The audio you capture constitutes sensitive user data, and you must make every effort to protect it. You must also obtain the user’s permission before sending that data across the network to Apple’s servers. You request authorization using the APIs of the Speech framework.“

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/asking_perm...

Which languages are processed on device and not send to Apple’s servers?

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